Chapter Three

Chapter Three

Such a rare beauty—the girl drinking blood from between her breasts—on the one hand it transfixed the line of men standing in her presence. And on the other, caused another man to literally convulse in his boots, and rattle the room with his great dismay.

“Bastard! Bastard! Bastard!” he sang out, as the three heads toppled to the floor.

Princess gently held Takako’s head and smiled at him. “Who do you think I am, General? This girl now serves me. Could anything pain Setsura more? Or you?”

The scorn was not at an end. Neither was the despair. The scene wasn’t over yet. Takako’s throat pulsed as she continued to swallow—the blood of the vampiress—in a trance.

The cries of anguish changed. Here was the end to the despair. Now erupted the fury. Bey turned to the JDF commanders. “What are you doing? What are you looking at? You promised! Deliver this girl safely to me and I would give you the secrets of eternal life. You have ruined everything! No, I swear, this woman, I will seize her with my own hands and bring her to your autopsy room where you may dissect her to your heart’s content! In the name of Kazikli Bey!”

He charged Princess like a lurching giant, aiming at her white throat. She didn’t move. He seized the suckling Takako by the shoulder. In turn, Princess grabbed Takako around the waist and spun her around to face him.

The sound of breaking bones and the smell of blood. Takako smiled a complacent smile as the startled General Bey reflexively stepped back.

Ah, the licentious grin on the face of this smart and trim college student. Drinking blood and having it drunk—what a red-stained future awaited her. Not showing the slightest pain from her broken shoulder, Takako wrapped a white hand around the general’s neck. Her lips were red and wet.

“Are you the one who seeks me?”

Her hand squeezed as tightly as an iron vise, clenching his neck with enough strength to choke a sumo wrestler. Not human in the least.

General Bey gently grasped her wrist and pulled it away, as if loosening the grip of a child. “Good night,” he said, and struck her in the solar plexus. Takako fainted. A vampire fainting was a strange sight, but the blow had been delivered by one too.

Princess quickly retreated out of reach. Takako raised her head. “Too bad, Bey.” The voice was Princess’s.

“You fucking wench.”

The general started running. No sound of pounding feet as he leapt into the air and landed behind Princess with a quickness that was closer to teleportation. He struck at her chest with a nukite blow, his fingertips closed together like the tip of a spear.

A cry, and blood frothed at her lips—Takako’s lips. Startled, he drew back his bloody hand, hearing Takako and Princess’s derisive laughter.

“Hoh. First you break your beloved’s shoulder, then stab her in the chest. What next? Have at her. She is not the perfect servant, but her body has already been endowed for that duty. Gouge out her eyes, tear out her tongue, rip off her breasts, gnaw at her privates—it’s all fine by me!”

To toy so with the general of the dead—who made even Setsura Aki tremble—such humiliation was impossible to fathom. To take this dear girl, transform her into a vampire, give her an immortal body, and then destroy it by the general’s hands—such cruelty was even more impossible to fathom.

“I won’t kill her. She won’t die. But she will suffer, General. Break the shoulder and pierce the chest—anyone would feel the pain. But she will not die. That is why I laugh. You must understand that as well.”

No smile could be more evil. Or more lovely. Even the general was stilled for a moment, before his face once again clouded with wrath.

“Release her. And I shall do you the honor of drawing and quartering you myself.”

He spat out the hateful words as he brought his hand to his mouth. He demanded her liberation as he tasted her fresh blood. He licked his hand as a child would a spatula—this was the expression of his love.

On one side a fairy, on the other the devil. At the mercy of the fangs of these two unworldly monsters, the entranced Takako was an indescribable amalgam of misery and lust.

Elite soldiers like Jinnai with actual combat experience under their belts stood frozen in place by the ghastly carnage before their eyes. They were fighters to the core, who would execute their own families if so ordered. But while choking back tears.

Even when annihilating a merciless enemy, the darkness would dam up in their souls. With every mission accomplished, it would only increase and could never be expunged. They truly believed that acknowledging its existence would stand in the final judgment as a tribute to the dead.

And yet what they saw as these two toyed with this innocent girl was the cruel temperament of a child that delighted in breaking the arms off a doll, gouging out the glass eyes, hammering nails through the plastic chest. If the inanimate were given voice, it would surely bewail its outcast state.

“I haven’t the time for this,” Princess said in a frigid voice. She put her arm around Takako’s waist. “I only came here to obtain hostages that would ensure my safe return. Well, whatever. Thanks to you being here, she is mine. Wrack your brains over that one, you idiot. She will never be yours. Forever. Hoh! I’ll leave it to you to untie that Gordian Knot. Do you know how?”

“I know. And now I shall do it,” General Bey said darkly.

“Get back! You want this girl torn limb from limb?” The rebuke hit him like a slap across the face. As if by design, Prime Minister Ryohei Kongodai tottered in front of Princess. “The leader of the nation, eh? Not much of an escort, but you will do. And if Kikiou is still alive, I’m sure he will want to see you. The two of you can discuss the fate of this little smudge of a country.”

Kongodai led the way as Princess backed out of the room, using Takako as a shield against General Bey’s malevolent intentions. Jinnai and the others hadn’t counted on the prime minister more or less voluntarily stepping forward as a hostage. And neither did the general charge after them. Her threat to draw and quarter Takako wasn’t a bluff he could risk calling.

Princess exited into the hall. The armored hovertanks floated there forward and rear of her position. The only person their laser cannon could vaporize right now was the prime minister.

She looked at the hovercrafts. Each of the tortoise shell-shaped hovertanks contained three operators. The instant the pilot looked into her eyes through the periscope, a singular thought arrested all other activity in his brain.

Princess’s lips moved. “Destroy.”

As the disbelieving ministers looked on, the hovercraft in front suddenly rammed the one behind at full speed. An indecipherable shout was drowned out by the sound of crushing steel. The hovertank in back spun around and buried itself into the wall on the right.

“What the hell are you doing?” shouted the co-pilot and communications officer of the struck vehicle. He lurched toward the pilot just as the hovertank whirled around again, throwing him against the gunner hard enough to knock the eyes out of his head and snap the gunner’s neck.

The pilot didn’t even look to see what was going on behind him when he switched the firing controls into the navigation unit. As if covering the retreating Princess, he fired at the hovertank still embedded into the wall with his 120 mm cannon.

The hot ruby light bathed the heat-resistant ceramic armor in a red glow, penetrating the shell in two seconds. The fuel erupted in flames. The shell cracked like an over-boiled egg. Fire and light streamed out, growing into an expanding fireball that beat at the blast walls before scorching and battering them to pieces.

With no place else to go, the high-pressure sheet of plasma raced down the corridors, cutting down Jinnai and the ministers like a fiery scythe and turning them into kindling. At the ends of the hallways, it smashed through the windows and lunged out into the air, roaring at the endless night like a fire-breathing dragon.

“Well, well, well!” Somewhere the beautiful voice spoke in admiration. “Of course. I did not imagine she would enter the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Complex of her own free will.”

“That fire is in the direction from which I am being called.” A voice filled with rust. “Do I have any choice but to go, Shuuran?”

Holding Takako and Prime Minister Kongodai to her waist, Princess descended the stairs like she was treading water. The howls of sirens echoed all around them. No sound came from her footsteps. A good eighteen inches separated the bottom of her feet from the ground.

Laser light penetrated the ceiling, incinerating the people running after them.

“Ah, how sweet. Please, rain down more fire, more death and destruction upon their heads. That’s the only way to make this country into a more agreeable place.”

A turbine whine resembling the sound of a loud horsefly reached their ears as soldiers in military fatigues closed in on them. The three carried a tactical atomic cannon called the “Juggler.” They took up firing positions, but were held up by the sight of Prime Minister Kongodai.

In that moment, Princess took off. Leaving her clothing behind. Naked. Her black hair streamed behind her like a comet’s tail. Her breasts swayed. Her thighs throbbed.

The beauty of this leap was a unique kind of beauty in and of itself, that ruled over death and destruction. The instant her white hand touched the soldier setting up the Juggler, his head and helmet flew away like a helium balloon.

Before the blood erupted from his now headless torso, she had kicked it away and with her hands and feet plucked the heads off the remaining soldiers and sliced and diced their bodies. There was an aesthetic in this dance of death that entranced them even as they died.

Princess looked down at the Juggler still clasped in the soldier’s bloody hands and beckoned to Prime Minister Kongodai. The most powerful politician in the country walked over like a man sleepwalking.

“Hold this,” she said.

The prime minister cradled the weapon in his arms and staggered. She seized him by the scruff of his neck and drew him to the hillocks of her breasts. Her chest was smeared with blood, the blood that Takako had sucked.

Their surroundings were on fire and fragrant with the smell of burning flesh. Blood and saliva drew a speckled pattern on her chest. The prime minster’s full lips pressed against her breasts. His tongue lapped at her nipples. His cheeks sucked in and out.

Then a wet slurp as she pushed his face away. Not bothering to wipe his mouth, muddied with blood and gore, he stared enraptured at the Demon Princess.

“From the manner in which those soldiers were deployed, this weapon should be loaded. Pull back that bolt.”

The metal alloy and carbon fiber construction notwithstanding, the fully loaded 150 mm atomic cannon must have weighed a good sixty pounds. But the prime minister operated it with ease.

“Release the safety. This lever, I suspect. Put it to your shoulder. That’s right. Aim it over there somewhere. Doesn’t matter where.”

She pointed at the hole in the second floor left by the hovertank. Here was further evidence of her truly terrifying nature. The hole in fact led directly to the ammunition vault in the second sublevel basement.

The prime minister nodded. The light from the blazing inferno flickered across his entranced face as the cannon round traced a lazy arc through the air. At that moment—

The astonished Princess whirled around. The expression on her face broadcast the magnitude of the blunder she had made. Takako was where she had left her. Standing next to her was the Herculean outline of a man.

“General Bey—so you’re still alive.”